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Comment by tempnow987 | Hacker News Reader

For a company that had a dude yelling Developers on stage - how in the world did they blow their dev stack so badly?

XAML, WPF, UWP, silverlight etc etc.

They owned with WinForms back in the day. There was nothing close to market share / productivity for LOB apps. Then it was like they just dynamited repeatedly, and kept on dynamiting?

I can't even imagine the wasted dev cycles, and now the wasted time using janky juddering online apps (even Vax/VMS green screen LOB apps were actually FASTER -> keyboard driven, no lag). If you tracked medical billing from vax/vms days (a fast typist could crank through billing slips and a tech forward clinical staff could checkin a patient and go with a few keyboard keys (including the good old F keys)). Now its wait wait wait, mouse click, mouse move, click, wait type, submit, wait.

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I dunno, a Martian surveying the 2022 development landscape might believe the company that owned GitHub and VSCode was doing fairly well.

When the GitHub purchase was happening, there was a lot of noise from both parties about how the companies would remain separate and GitHub would keep the things which make it appealing to developers; it therefore seems disingenuous to me to consider any of the positives of GitHub to be attributable to MS.

But they don't capture them to develop against their frameworks. I liked WPF, but their APIs were clearly influenced by business decisions like forcing software into their store, especially in UWP.

I am not yet if they are a reliable partner to invest time in. Apple uses such a model, but then why would I use Windows if it just morphs into a worse clone of it? I dislike that model and believe it is extremely bad for digital/technical education.

Those that use open systems with software freedom will shield others from the worst exploits MS or Apple might come up with in the future.

VSCode is indeed nice. Github is ok.

> how in the world did they blow their dev stack so badly?

Did they?

With TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, npm and GitHub alone they control by far the biggest share of development stack out there in 2022.

I would add on top of this some other libraries that I consider huge sleepers but I think will even further spread and conquer market such as pnpm, playwright and rush.js.

There's also C#, Visual Studio, DirectX and many other Microsoft technologies devs use every day.

Step by step they will keep integrating many new generation developers into their ecosystem which, if they keep improving on their azure, office and teams integration will considerably drive up their revenue.

As long as Microsoft keeps working hard in this direction and doesn't start alienating the customers I can see them cutting more and more shares of the dev and release markets.

They lost the mobile war and web tech creeped in. Their tech stack is quite good but they stuck to Windows only and that turned from an advantage to a disadvantage. They're turning it around at least.

WinForms is still available and has the same productivity.

dotnet has successfully transformed itself and is quite popular.

XAML is ok, I guess.

They have stumbled in the Mobile app dev frameworks, focusing on Xamarin, but seem to be moving to MAUI now.

I like .NET Core a lot and use it for my back-end services, but when it comes to giving things to end users there is just no good story for it at all.

I'd be more than happy to try .NET Maui but I have to keep a VM around to try it out on my main dev machine. I figure being a .NET developer on Linux you are always going to be slightly 2nd class in their eyes, but the experience with docker-ce and VSCode on Linux is streets ahead of Windows and WSL2 with that single glaring exception. It just can't be that hard.

what's wrong with WSL2? I've had a good experience with vscode running on windows with WSL remote connection.

There is nothing really wrong with it, I used it for a while but in the end I felt like Linux with extra steps was too much.

WSL2 allowed an easy migration path to VSCode but once I had that working, I found myself learning all the CLI for dotnet, docker and AWS to replace what I was doing in Visual Studio.

At that point I had nothing to lose and switched to Debian, which had the great side effect of making Android Studio better (the emulators on Linux seem faster and more reliable).

I don't hate WSL2 but if all your tools are supported on Linux, removing Windows from the equation makes your setup much simpler. At least it does for me.

I do work for myself though, so no corporate requirements held me back.

Not really true, I develop .NET Core apps on Linux only. Migrated from Windows to actual Linux because of the simplicity.

Have you tried Avalonia? It's not from Microsoft, but it's a .NET GUI solution that works on Linux and is really pretty good.

I'm fine with XAML, but I don't know what XAML platform is stable and futureproof. Maybe WPF, still.

imo. WPF seems like a good framework that will last a while, while not being a pain to work with like WinForms. I know there are better options nowadays but WPF is a trusted and established technology that will probably not fade a way for quite some time, simply because "it works" and there is no real reason to get rid of it.

I agree but they don’t care because they dominate the market.

Yes. They have the power to push whatever they want on captive audience (engineers forced to work with MS stack). That means they don't need to care whether what they're pushing is actually good.

So it mostly isn't.

> XAML, WPF, UWP, silverlight

Aka bunch of mediocre walled garden tech. I'd much prefer QT

You seem to suggest that it would be a good thing for everyone for those thing to succeed? The only people who benefit from those are MS and their developer base.

I'd argue the users benefit from having something that integrates tightly with the OS rather than an application that targets the lowest common denominator of all platforms. Qt applications always feel a bit shitty to me, I only use them if there is no alternative.

the users benefit by having an app at least. It's unlikely that apps written in the walled garden will be ported to other OSes. If they make those apps cross platform somehow, it would be the lowest common denominator in other OSes.

Windows isn't a walled garden. It's a bit shitty but anybody can write and distribute software for Windows.

I don't know if you mean the same thing but I feel it's KDE that's shitty. When I played around with QT Creator on Windows it seemed great

> walled garden

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

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